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<p class="apa">Math anxiety has been the focus of much psychological and educational research in the past few years, there are many international studies showing that mathematics anxiety is an influence on student’s achievements in school, but little research has been done about this issue in Bahrain. Bahrain is a country in the Arabian Gulf region, its economic development is increasing rapidly, and there is currently a focus on improving the school education outcomes to fit the 21st century requirements. Bahrain started a huge curriculum project in September 2013 by changing the primary math curriculum across the country, and will continue the changes to secondary curriculum in the coming years. These changes are intended to improve mathematics education in the country, since Bahraini math scores have been below the international mean for a very long time. This study attempts to investigate if there is a relationship between anxiety and underachieving in mathematics in Bahrain. The Revised Mathematics Anxiety (R-MANX) Survey (Bursal, 2006) was translated into Arabic and administered to 1352 primary students. The data was analyzed to explore the reliability and validity of the translated survey and the associations between Mathematics anxiety and achievement. This paper reports the findings of the study.</p>

We apply the idea of using a matter time gauge in quantum gravity to quantum cosmology. For the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) Universe with dust and cosmological constant Λ, we show that the dynamics maps exactly to the simple harmonic oscillator in the dust-time gauge. For Λ > 0 the oscillator frequency is imaginary, for Λ < 0 it is real, and for Λ = 0 the Universe is a free particle. This result provides (i) a simple demonstration of non-perturbative singularity avoidance in quantum gravity for all Λ, (ii) an exact Lorentzian Hartle-Hawking wave function, and (iii) gives the present age of the Universe as the characteristic decay time of the propagator. I. INTRODUCTIONThe application of quantum theory to gravity is pursued using a number of different approaches (see e.g. [1] for a recent survey). These can be broadly divided into twothose that are "background dependent" and those that are not [2]. The term refers to what structures in the classical theory are to be held fixed in the passage to quantum theory. The canonical quantization approach formulated by DeWitt [3] is considered to be the defining case of a background independent approach to quantum gravity; this is also the paper where the very first quantization of the FRLW model was described.The canonical quantization program naturally divides into two distinct approaches. These are referred to as (i) Dirac quantization, where the Hamiltonian constraint is imposed as an operator condition on wave function(al)s, and (ii) reduced phase space quantization, where * Electronic address: masooma.ali@unb.ca † Electronic address: shassan@unb.ca ‡ Electronic address: vhusain@unb.ca arXiv:1807.03864v2 [gr-qc]

We study general relativity with pressureless dust in the canonical formulation, with the dust field chosen as a matter-time gauge. The resulting theory has three physical degrees of freedom in the metric field. The linearized canonical theory reveals two graviton modes and a scalar mode. We find that the graviton modes remain Lorentz covariant despite the time gauge, and that the scalar mode is ultralocal. We discuss also a modification of the theory to include a parameter in the Hamiltonian analogous to that in Horava-Lifshitz models. In this case the scalar mode is no longer ultralocal, and acquires a propagation speed dependent on the deformation parameter. * Electronic address: vhusain@unb.ca

We study the Hamiltonian dynamics of the dust-Bianchi IX universe in dust time gauge. This model has three physical metric degrees of freedom, with evolution determined by a time-independent physical Hamiltonian. This approach gives a new physical picture where dust-Bianchi IX dynamics is described by oscillations between dust-Kasner solutions, rather than between vacuum-Kasner solutions. We derive a generalized transition law between these phases, which has a matter component. Sufficiently close to a singularity, we show that this law reduces to the vacuum Belinski-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz map. We include an analysis with dust and a scalar field. Lastly, we describe a path integral quantization using the dust-time physical Hamiltonian, and derive an effective action for the dust-Kasner model by integrating out the anisotropy degrees of freedom.